The Future is Here and Now: Trust, Transparency, and Video Fetishism in Surveillance Landscapes

• In Event: A New/Old Technology for Governance? Questioning Big Data Surveillance - II: Prediction, Race and Resistance

Abstract

Drawing upon ethnographic research of activists, police officers, and federal contracts, this paper juxtaposes the dynamic aspects of Houston’s surveillance landscape. In 2018, the DEA and ICE gained access to Houston’s city cameras under the guise of drug trafficking, human smuggling, and “other illicit activities.” Meanwhile, local police officers are equipped with body-worn cameras after national conversations about the possibilities of transparency through continuous video. However, a police officer remarked that “Watching a body-worn video is like watching a baseball game through a straw.” Nevertheless, local activist groups draw attention to the lack of access to the videos of city and police cameras. This surveillance landscape of federal access to city cameras, the potentials and deficiencies of body-worn cameras, and organizations monitoring these activities for civil rights abuses begs the question: who and what is being protected with videos? While surveillance in its many forms is not new and draws from long-standing relationships between policing, race, and technology, big data surveillance is “reinventing the (affective, imaginative, and material) terms of everyday life by extending its reach ever deeper into both individual lives and collective futures” (Masco 2017: 386). With an awareness of how surveillance is unequally applied to brown and black bodies (Browne 2016), this paper employs critical anthropology of security and feminist surveillance studies to argue that a future without privacy is here and now. Through video fetishism, we can begin to ask questions about the possibilities of trust and transparency in complex surveillance landscapes.

Author

• Jessica L Bray, Rice University